Active programs for selling patents—particularly in large businesses—weren’t really in use until recent years. This may have been due to lack of inventory control, in which case companies simply didn’t have a solid understanding of what they owned, or a lack of business management, in which case the company had no real understanding of the business applications possible with intellectual property.

Early in 2018, Amazon made big news once again, this time for its $1 billion purchase of the Ring brand, which included video doorbell apps and equipment, and now also offers various other home security options. Ring made waves with its introduction to the world, its biggest “howdy” taking place on Shark Tank. It was easy to see—at least for consumers—that Ring was going places. Those with insight into intellectual property, however, had some doubts.

So far, throughout this series, we’ve established the IBM revolutionized the way corporations monetize their patents by filing for them by the tens of thousands. Of course, we also know that filing and maintaining a single patent family can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of those patents.

This is a really cool story. We’ll let you know that up front because there are some things we can’t tell you. We can’t tell you the names of some of the characters in the story, like the Venture Capital Fund (we’ll just call him VC, okay?) and the Innovator. We can’t tell you the innovation or patent numbers. You may have a hard time getting invested in a story when you don’t know the names of the characters, but we promise the story is still so cool that you’ll be hanging on all the way to the end.